Anissa Hollingshead is the City Clerk for the City of Rochester. She said after election day, all the ballots are sent to the county, kept in a secure storage area for 22 months, then destroyed. But as for now, they’re still being looked at to make sure all the results are correct.

“Everything about elections is about redundancy,” Hollingshead said. “Checking and double checking, and verifying and cross verifying to make sure everything matches up and that it is fully accurate.”

According to Hollingshead, the county is doing most of the heavy-lifting making sure all the numbers add up. But she is crunching some numbers of her own, like how many people registered for voting on November 6 and figuring out the city’s voter turnout.

Due to data accessibility, the city calculates voter turnout a little differently than the state of Minnesota. Hollingshead’s latest numbers show this about the city’s voter turnout:

“Nothing's scheduled for 2019 but in the event that we had a special election, we'd want to make sure we have all our locations lined up,” Hollingshead said.

The city has to lock down polling locations by the end of this year for a possible 2019 election.

And while the 2020 election may seem far off in the distance, planning for the historic election will take a lot of planning. It is the first time Minnesota will have 3 elections, since it switched from a caucus to a primary for the presidential election. In 2020, the state will have a presidential primary earlier in the year, then the primary election, ending with the general election.

The 2018 election results will be canvassed, or in other words, “made official,” by the end of the week.

All federal, state, and county election results will be canvassed at 1pm on Thursday, November 15, in the conference room near the Council Chambers.

All city election results will be canvassed at 1pm on Friday, November 16, in Room 320 on the third floor of City Hall.